The Prehistory Of Language {ReadingNotes}

The Prehistory of Language edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight - ISBN 0199545871 - OUP 2009

Notes that Google Book has another indexing thus it's not an offest of +18 but +20 ... this should be corrected

Motivation

Describe in a sentences or two what motivated me to read this book.

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

• 1 Introduction: rewards and challenges of multi-perspectival work on the evolution of language and speech
  • Multidisciplinary nature of the topic and thus of the book (p1)
  • Presentation of each chapter from page 1 to 8
  • notion of "cognitive economy" briefly defined (p7)
  • "The concern here is with something else altogether: namely, a fundamental question that arises in multi-perspectival work on the evolution of language and speech, the question of how to deal with the divergence of ideas." (p9)
    • presenting conflicting ideas amongst the book yet each being individualy coherent
• 2 Why only humans have language
  • Why did language evolve? (p12)
  • "For humans, as with all primates, effectively bonded social groups are essential for successful survival and reproduction, and since grooming has a natural limit on the size of group that can be bonded by it, language was necessary to break through this glass ceiling and allow larger groups to evolve. " (p14)
    • a principle that seems coherent with emerging social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and Google Wave and from our ability to create and use tools to support the increasing size of our potential peer group
    • and my own proposal Person.Person
  • "predicting that language evolved to allow information-exchange, for example, is not especially helpful because both social and instrumental hypotheses make the same assumption. What is required is a different approach. " (p15)
  • "this limit at 20% creates a glass ceiling on social group size at about eighty individuals, and effectively prevents further increases in group size when these are required by novel ecological conditions. The glass ceiling can only be broken through when some more efficient way is found to use time for social bonding." (p17-18)
  • "language allowed hominins to break through the glass ceiling precisely because it enabled them to use their time more efficiently for social bonding" (p18)
  • "Sexual selection is an especially powerful mechanism for exploiting phenomena that already exist, and it can as easily be argued that, once language is in place for more general reasons, then sexual selection is very likely to exploit it. " (p22)
    • see my notes on The Mating Mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature by Geoffrey Miller
  • "the gossip hypothesis offers a single mechanism that not only resolves the bonding problem, but also encompasses the other two hypotheses [the Scheherazade effect and the Social contract] as emergent properties. " (p23)
  • When did language evolve? (p23)
    • "results suggest that the capacity for some form of language-like communication had to be in place by 500,000 years ago, but probably not a lot before. " (p28)
  • Why do only humans have language? (p30)
  • "No one else has evolved group sizes large enough to require more than grooming for social bonding. " (p30)
  • "Without theory of mind to allow us to reconstruct the mental state of the speaker in particular, conversation would be very stilted, would be limited to simple factual exchanges, and would certainly lack the richness of modern human exchanges. " (p30)
  • "the upper limit for normal adults is fifth order [reflexive series of levels of intentionality]" (p30)
    • "it may impose a limit on the number of people we can hold in a conversation. " (p30)
    • comparable with chess strategy and how deep a player can simulate a game amongst the tree of possibilities
  • "This scale [of order of intentionality] seems to be linearly related to the absolute volume of these species' respective frontal lobes" (p31)
  • very interesting discussion on this limit and Shakespeare plays and the writing skills required
  • "language helps us manage more complex propositional sequences. That being so, we can ask: At what level of recursion does language become essential? " (p34)
• 3 Is sociality a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of language?
  • "[this chapter] examine the extent to which ultrasociality is indeed a crucial prerequisite. " (p38)
  • "the great strength of human language is precisely its open-ended, fluid character, so that it can adapt extremely quickly to cope with the never-ending stream of possible novel meanings that need to be expressed. " (p39)
  • "empirical data shows that language innovation is only driven by those who have already mastered enough systematicity and influence in the community so that their innovations have a chance to start spreading (Croft 2000)" (p40)
    • Explaining Language Change An Evolutionary Approach
  • "As Mufwene (2002) has put it: Language users are not in the business of learning a system but of communicating, and they use all possible resources to achieve that goal. " (p40)
    • hence the efficiency of language exchange vs. classrom
  • "new linguistic material can get into an individual's inventory in two ways:
    • either by his inventing it as speaker,
    • or by his adopting it as hearer. " (p41)
      • see also my Vocabulary? and my Newconcepts pages
  • "Grammaticalization occurs when these novel syntactic usage patterns have been sufficiently conventionalized that they are no longer seen as odd. " (p41)
  • "there is a two-level system:
    • an inventory of form-meaning pairs (constructions) which are routinely used, and
    • an inventory of repair strategies which become active when some sort of problem occurs." (p42)
      • equivalent to an anti-pattern detection system
  • "The individual and communal selection systems are coupled in the sense that individuals will prefer constructions that are known and used by others in order to increase their own communicative success." (p42-43)
  • "the Complex Adaptive Systems approach to language emergence and language dynamics proposes that language systems remain fluid as they are continuously adapted by their users. " (p44)
  • "We define exhaustively in computational terms the cognitive architecture of an agent, which includes generic facilities for symbolic processing, such as unifying and merging feature structures (Steels and de Beule 2006), as well as procedures for detecting failures and executing repairs, and scripts for interacting with other agents. " (p46)
    • see also similar mutli-agent system simulations used in Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture Springer 2006 and also from VUB AI lab
    • Luc Steels page at the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
  • "the purpose of the experiment is to see what kinds of categories and linguistic constructions will emerge given specific repair strategies and, more specifically, whether the emergent languages involve perspective marking and grammatical constructions to express them. " (p48)
  • "three specific examples of experiments [Joint attention, Perspective reversal, The reciprocal naming game] that shed more light on how far sociality is a crucial prerequisite. " (p51)
    • "without strong joint attention, communicative success dives below chance, with the result that the evolution of communication does not get off the ground. " (p51)
    • "a cooperative attitude is really the driving force towards the lexicalization and grammaticalization processes that shape complex language. " (p54)
    • "It is in the interest of both cooperation and deception to use the agreed naming conventions. " (p55)
  • "Sociality is reflected both in the cognitive processes and in the interaction patterns (language games) of the agents. Ultrasociality, that is sociality beyond immediate kin, implies that there is a risk of exploitation and apparently animal communication systems are not prepared to take this risk. But human languages do, and as a consequence they are richer and adapt faster compared to animal communication systems. " (p57)
  • concluding that "sociality is a crucial prerequisite for language and that language in turn must have helped maintain sociality in our species. " (p57)
• 4 Holistic communication and the co-evolution of language and music: resurrecting an old idea
  • "[this chapter] argue that musicality [variations in pitch, rhythm, tone, and timbre of the voice and the equivalent with regard to movements of the body] is indeed a key to understanding how language evolved: in essence, we can speak together because we once sang together. " (p59)
  • "The use of variations in pitch, rhythm, tone, and timbre is particularly striking when one is listening to accomplished orators - the likes of Hitler, Luther King, and Churchill. The musical qualities of their orations are evidently playing a key role in their effectiveness. " (p59)
  • "The musicality of language, and the similarities and the differences between music and language, are open to three evolutionary interpretations" (p61)
    • "One of these systems of communication and expression might be largely derivative of the other." (p61)
    • "language and music have completely independent evolutionary histories, with their overlaps being a consequence of recent cultural history. " (p62)
    • "music and language might have evolved from a single form of ancient communication and expression that had elements of both systems but cannot be adequately characterized as primarily one or the other. " (p62)
  • "Six reasons for the use of holistic phrases rather than a compositional protolanguage by pre-modern humans" (p65)
    • "This is the most parsimonious interpretation." (p65)
    • "Sociality requires communication but not compositional language." (p65)
    • "The cultural stability of pre-modern human." (p66)
      • "Compositional language is the motor for cultural change: The possibility of creating an infinite number of new utterances would lead to the possibility of creating new types of tools as knowledge about tool effectiveness and manufacturing methods is exchanged. " (p66)
    • "The absence of symbolic artifact." (p67)
    • "A protolanguage which was compositional in nature would have been unstable. " (p67)
    • "If it was not the appearance of compositional language, what else was the cause of the cultural changes associated with the appearance of modern humans? " (p67)
  • "Six reasons why hominin holistic phrase communication would have a degree of musicality" (p68)
    • "The evidence from anatomy." (p68)
    • "Singing and dancing for social bonding." (p69)
    • "The need to be emotional." (p69)
    • "Looking after infants." (p70)
    • "Display for mate attraction." (p70)
      • see my notes on The Mating Mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature by Geoffrey Miller
    • "Mimicry of the natural world." (p71)
  • "Hmmmmm stands for Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal,musicality, and mimetic, which I believe were the key features for this general type of communication system, one that no doubt varied between hominin species and communities. " (p71)
  • mention of Peter Carruthers and his view on the role of language in cognition (p75)
    • The evolution of creativity Human creativity: its cognitive basis, its evolution, and its connections with childhood pretence
• 5 Music as a communicative medium
  • "language possesses at least one capacity that music does not share: that of expressing and communicating propositions and propositional attitudes. " (p78-79)
  • "In this chapter we shall be suggesting that music's inability to express unambiguous meaning underwrites its powers to manage situations of social uncertainty and exploring a framework for understanding how music appears able to sustain such polyvalent significance. " (p79)
  • "In situations of social uncertainty language may become inefficacious or even dysfunctional. However, as we have noted, it is in just these types of situation that music appears most likely to manifest itself. " (p79)
  • "While some of these requirements appear to be contradictory (how can a signal be honest yet polysemic?), it will be argued here that music provides an example of a communicative medium that conforms to all these requirements. " (p80)
  • "Responses to music are evidently motivated by a history of personal engagement (Davies 1978), yet this history is not wholly individual and personal; it is mediated by, and rooted in, culture. " (p84)
  • "We can now postulate two dimensions in the experience of meaning in music [...]
    • the motivational-structural dimension [...]
    • the culturally enactive dimension. " (p85)
  • "music can be viewed as embodying the characteristics of the medium optimally adapted for the management of social uncertainty outlined earlier" (p87)
  • "Music, like language, uses entrainment to coordinate interaction, but in music this serves a primary function and hence its cues for interaction are more strongly evident. " (p93)
  • "music and language are complementary aspects of the modern human communicative toolkit, each functioning to achieve ends in respect of which the other may be less efficacious;" (p94)
• 6 Cultural niche construction: evolution's cradle of language
  • "By integrating human niche construction with gene-culture co-evolutionary theory (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Laland et al. 2000; Richerson and Boyd 2005), we develop an evolutionary framework to explore the evolution of language. " (p99)
    • see also my notes on Demons in Eden by Jonathan Silvertown, 2008
  • "changes that organisms bring about in their own worlds are seldom thought to have evolutionary significance, and are rarely viewed as evolutionary processes. " (p101)
  • "the adaptations of organisms cannot be exclusively consequences of organisms responding to autonomous natural selection: Sometimes they must be consequences of niche-constructing organisms responding to selection previously transformed by their own activities, or those of their ancestors" (p101)
  • "organisms are bound to impose some nonrandom changes on their environments through their work" (p104)
  • "Standard evolutionary theory can recognize niche construction as a product of evolution, but it cannot recognize it as a cause. " (p104)
  • "Niche construction is both tractable to theoretical analyses and evolutionarily consequential. Adding niche construction to evolutionary theory changes our understanding of how evolution works. " (p106)
  • "active formation and maintenance of a social group depends critically on the members of a group being able to communicate with each other. " (p107)
  • "<<group niche construction>> [...] may demand shared fitness goals and some cooperation from multiple members of a group. " (p108)
  • "Animal communication has been studied for decades without being called <<niche construction>> (Thorpe 1958; Maynard-Smith and Harper 2003), so why call it <<niche construction>> now?
    • Partly, to emphasize that all organisms are active components of each other's environments, and that between-organism communication typically induces phenotypic changes among the communicators.
    • Organisms are therefore likely to modify one or more of the natural selection pressures in their own and in each other's environments by communicating. " (p109)
  • "although individual organisms do not live long, their niche-constructed products, be they termite mounds, beaver dams, or the organization of social groups and the communication networks on which that organization depends, can last much longer. The organization of animal societies, and their communication networks, can be transmitted across multiple generations of a population as an ecological inheritance" (p109)
  • "Two preliminary points apply to all forms of communicative niche construction.
    • First, communication can only directly modify biotic sources of natural selection, by acting on whatever semantic information is carried by other organisms. It cannot act directly on any source of selection that does not itself carry and express semantic information. [...]
    • Second, the recognition that other organisms carry both material and informational resources may eventually require an extension of our previous models." (p110-111)
  • "we would expect a continuous <<arms race,>> or struggle for social status, or social power, in any social animals that live in groups" (p112)
    • see also my notes on The Red Queen by Matt Ridley, 1999
  • "Theoretical analyses suggest that cultural responses to self-imposed modified selection typically occur more rapidly than genetic responses, and often render genetic responses unnecessary" (p114)
    • see also How We Evolve by Benjamin Phelan, Seed Magazine 2008 (first added in my PersonalInformationStream.WithoutNotes page)
  • "Enlarged neocortices and increased cognitive capacities may then have allowed hominids to express more cultural innovations, such as the cultural practice of cooking, which subsequently permitted a further reduction in gut size and another increase in brain size" (p115)
    • An Edible History of Humanity: Tom Standage, FORA.tv, June 2009 (first added in my PersonalInformationStream.WithoutNotes page)
  • "humans have socially learned communication, which implies that the selection pressures favoring language must have been changing, and changing at a rate that evolved forms of communication could not track. " (p117)
  • "our ancestors constructed the environmental conditions that favored hominid reliance on culture (Odling-Smee et al. 2003), building niches in which it paid them to transmit more information to their offspring (Laland et al. 2000). " (p118-119)
  • "The more an organism controls and regulates its environment, and the environment of its offspring, the greater should be the advantage of transmitting cultural information across generations. " (p119)
    • one can think about that in a political context with an educational system managed by politicians securing the top schools, a principle close to the Condorcet model described in Incultures 2
  • "Once started, cultural niche construction may become an autocatalytic process, with greater culturally generated environmental regulation leading to increasing homogeneity of the social environment as experienced by old and young, favoring further transgenerational cultural transmission. " (p119)
  • "At least in humans, subtle cheats might operate by gaining control of communication networks, ensuring that the messages that were sent maximized their returns. Conceivably, this form of cheating might select for more competent, skillful communicators. " (p120-121)
  • "Our main objective is to offer an alternative evolutionary framework, based on two reciprocal causal processes in evolution, natural selection and niche construction, particularly cultural niche construction, instead of natural selection only (Laland and Sterelny 2006). " (p121)
• 7 Playing With Meaning: Normative Function and Structure in Play
  • "This chapter explores the potential of social play to generate shared fields of reference and simple rules in the co-construction of intentional actions and routines in which players demonstrate mutual awareness through structured signals, monitoring the attention of others, and cooperative engagement with an object. " (p122)
  • "dialogic structural and normative functions make social play a proper model for understanding the emergence of language, as a negotiated, self-organizing system rather than a system of communication limited to modern human societies" (p122)
  • "five criteria that identify play:
    • (1) a limited immediate function;
    • (2) an endogenous component in which the activity appears to be spontaneous, voluntary, intentional, pleasurable, rewarding, or reinforcing, and done for its own sake (autoletic);
    • (3) structural or temporal differences from ethotypic behavior;
    • (4) the repetition of salient actions and themes within and across play bouts; and
    • (5) finally, a relaxed behavioral field relatively free of stress. " (p123)
  • "Participants in play co-construct meaning in a social context in real time, and simple rules appear to guide hierarchically embedded patterns of action. " (p123-124)
  • "We thus approached this game as a contextually embedded discourse in which the whole exchange was a process of <<negotiation, explicitly an establishing and/or exercising of authority, an invocation of rights, and an imposition of constraints between parties about [how the game] and, indeed, how life should be played>> (Taylor 1997: 12). " (p129)
  • "By recruiting activity over many cortical and subcortical areas, intentional representations co-constructed in play activate parts of networks also involved in non-play interactions. " (p138)
  • "Play was governed by a tendency to streamline and economize frequently repeated actions just as described in the dynamic simulation of language formation" (p139)
  • "dialogic structural and normative functions make social play a proper model for understanding the dynamic negotiation of language meaning, form, and syntax as an emergent, self-organized system of communication" (p141)
  • see also Peter Carruthers' work mentionned on Chapter 5 regarding creativity and pretence
• 8 The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Non-verbal Deixis
  • "Hominins were, [...] pre-adapted for one aspect of the faculty of language in the broad sense: joint attention" (p143)
  • "follow others' pointing and gaze to more distant objects, even when those objects are not initially in their field of view (Adamson 1996; Butterworth 2003; Franco and Butterworth 1996). This capacity is referred to by developmental psychologists as <<joint attention>>." (p143-144)
    • like highlights in ShiftSpace
  • "Joint attention is widely and reasonably considered to be crucial for language acquisition" (p144)
  • "Captive and wild apes are sampled from the same gene pool. Therefore, the different propensities of the different groups to point, and differences in pointing posture, are not genetic differences; chimpanzee pointing is a consequence of environmental influences on development. " (p150)
  • "joint attention is paradigmatically a distributed cognitive act. " (p153)
  • "Hidden assumption #1: early rearing history of apes is irrelevant to the development of declarative communication" (p157)
    • "(i) Orphaned from the wild, after witnessing their mothers being shot to death. " (p158)
    • "(ii) Raised in captivity in peer groups because the mothers were not competent to care for them. " (p158)
    • "(iii) Apes raised by their mothers in captivity" (p159)
    • "(iv) Cross-fostered apes" (p159)
  • "Hidden assumption #2: enriched early rearing experience of humans is irrelevant to the development of declarative pointing" (p160)
  • "Hidden assumption #3: declarative pointing is cognitively more sophisticated than imperative pointing" (p161)
    • "Pointing is, thus, an instrumental act, fundamentally imperative in nature, whether it is used in requestive contexts or in sharing attention to distant events" (p161)
  • "According to [the Representational hypothesis] then, joint attention - the coordination of attention between two individuals with respect to a specific, distal locus - derives from an insight into mind-body relationships that actually exist." (p162)
  • "the Representational hypothesis lacks parsimony in accounting for the emergence of so-called proto-declaratives for two reasons:
    • first, because it depends upon infants' representations of hypothetical entities that cannot be professed by these same children;
    • secondly, because it attributes two separate lineages of cognitive adaptations to account for very similar pointing behavior in very closely related organisms (humans and the other apes) with very similar anatomies who point in very similar ecological circumstances;" (p162-163)
  • "In the alternative scenario that we have outlined in this chapter, what we might call the Epigenetic perspective, our hominin ancestors faced epigenetically heritable ontogenetic contexts that were characterized by increasingly lengthy epochs of dependency of offspring upon their caregivers" (p163)
    • "according to this view, the capacity to capture and redirect the attention of a social partner is predicated upon cognitive abilities shared by humans and the other great apes, which emerge in particular kinds of contexts. " (p163)
  • "According to the evidence reviewed here, great apes easily develop deictic repertoires in the complete absence of any explicit attempt to train them. " (p164)
  • "we conclude that deixis, the ability to direct the attention of another to a specific locus, is a shared capacity of great apes and humans. " (p164)
• 9 The Directed Scratch: Evidence for a Referential Gesture in Chimpanzees?
  • "Until recently, most studies investigating the vocal communication of primates have focussed on three features essential for human language, the abilities to
    • (1) learn and modify calls,
    • (2) combine calls syntactically,
    • (3) refer to external events or objects in the environment" (p166)
  • "researchers have quite naturally compared speech to another mode of communication, gestures. " (p167)
  • "it is thought that gestures form a single, integrated system with speech" (p167)
  • "We test the following three alternative hypotheses:
    • The behavior reflects behavioral conformity due to stimulus enhancement.
    • The behavior represents a physical response by an individual to parasites or dirt, thereby drawing the attention of the groomer to a potential area to groom and is not used by the signaler to transfer a communicative message to the recipient.
    • The gesture is used communicatively to indicate a precise spot on the body and to request a desired future action, namely grooming. " (p170)
  • "behavioral criteria were used to infer goal-directedness:
    • (1) gazing at the recipient and
    • (2) response waiting (the signaler waits after the signal has been produced, expecting a response). " (p172)
  • "directed scratch occurred primarily in dyads consisting of high-ranking males. " (p175)
  • "directed scratching might be used during routine maintenance with no intention at all on the part of the scratching individual to communicate a specific message to nearby conspecifics. " (p176)
  • "the gesture may be used communicatively by signalers to indicate a precise spot on their bodies. " (p176)
  • "scratches are flexible communicative strategies which are used in different contexts and to signal different communicative messages such as <<follow me>> or <<groom me here>>." (p177)
  • "Here we propose that directed scratches similar to social scratches may have arisen from scratching behavior and were ritualized into communicative signals. " (p177)
  • "directed scratches may constitute the first step toward symbolic gestures. " (p180)
  • "Our findings are thus consistent with the hypothesis that gestures used by our closest living relatives might have been the crucial modality within which the evolutionary precursors of symbolic communication evolved" (p180)
• 10 The Origins of the Lexicon: How a Word-store Evolved
  • "[This chapter concludes] that there are indications of a scaffolding effect in evolution:
    • The structure of the protolexicon builds on pre-existing conceptual structure, labeling existing concepts;
    • word learning in early hominins facilitates and structures concept learning;
    • more structure gives rise to more categories, and also to more differentiated categories;
    • more categories require more labels; vocabulary is then driven to increase." (182)
  • "the mental lexicon is the set of vocabulary items (essentially, words and idioms) of the speaker's language, with each lexical entry having a set of phonetic, semantic, syntactic, and morphological features." (182)
  • "protolexicon [...] the earliest kind of word-store used by hominins for linguistic communication. " (183)
  • "if protolanguage is to be used for communication, the symbols must also be externalized, either by sounds, signs, or both. " (184)
  • "many concepts (such as object individuation, which is essential for learning discrete vocabulary items) did not emerge with language, but were already available for language to exapt. " (188)
  • "Hierarchical knowledge seems to be especially important, since it potentially gives structure to the whole lexicon, and may be exapted later on in evolution for handling the hierarchies found in other areas of the grammar (syntax in particular). " (188)
  • "What seems likely [...] is that primates in general, and probably anthropoid apes in particular, have evolved to recognize and distinguish very similar categories. Given such a basis, the lexicon built (or builds anew for each child) on the categories already in place." (193)
  • "we may begin to explain how the human lexicon comes to have such a large storage capacity: Labeling is important for categorization. " (193)
  • "if labels facilitate category learning, then in evolutionary terms, the ability to link a concept with a label is highly adaptive. " (197)
  • "The growth of vocabulary - even if it finds little external expression at first - is thus likely to produce an organism which is fitter for its environment. " (197)
  • "The discussion above suggests a possible evolutionary pathway towards a protolexicon, which is subsequently driven to increase in size via a scaffolding effect.
    • Pre-existing conceptual organization is available to give substance to protovocabulary, which is structured categorially and hierarchically on the basis of pre-linguistic knowledge.
    • Having a protovocabulary is in itself adaptive, but labels also aid early hominins in the learning of categories.
    • As more categories are learned, a finer-grained vocabulary becomes necessary, and the lexicon is driven to increase in size. " (199)
  • see also Save the Words.org by Oxford Fajar
• 11 Language-symbolization and Beyond
  • "I will argue that such a view [language being primarily a symbolic system to be used for communication] is too simplistic. " (p202)
  • "In discussing the <<evolution of language>> it is important to observe the following distinctions:
    • a. The evolution of the human lineage up to the emergence of language
    • b. The event that gave rise to the faculty of language as we know it
    • c. The subsequent evolution of humans and the emergence of language
    • d. A putative evolution OF language" (p206)
  • description of the human cognitive system (HCS) as a modular system including (p206)
    • Computational system of Human Language (CHL)
    • PF-interface (Phonetic Form)
    • C-I-interface (Conceptual-Intentional) stand for the interfaces with the sound (or gesture)
  • "The minimalist program seriously explores the idea that the syntactic system is intrinsically very simple, with the following principles:
    • i. Merge:
      • Combine two expressions into a composite expression
      • Indicate which of the two determines the further combinatorial properties of the result (the <<head>>)
    • ii. Agree:
      • Check whether two expressions match in features
      • Share feature values" (p207)
  • "one cannot imagine a gradual increase in recursivity: Recursivity is a yes-no property. There isn't such a thing as a bit of recursivity" (p210-211)
  • "recursivity is not the only property that is special to language, there is still a reason to single it out: It is the one property that is non-gradual by necessity. " (p211)
  • "Given the properties of the linguistic space, recursion necessarily alters the nature of signs. To put it a bit provocatively, recursion effectively turns language into a formal system. " (p211)
  • "The addition of g [a formal instruction representing combinability] leads us beyond the Saussurean sign. It is a minimal change, prima facie trivial perhaps, but it is qualitative in nature. Adding this property to the sign opens the door for purely grammatical <<machinery>>." (p212)
  • "severing the direct connection between form and interpretation, as necessitated by embedded recursion realized in a linear medium, leads to what may well be the most characteristic property of language: Desymbolization" (p218)
  • "purely mental objects severed from direct realization and interpretation opens the door for core properties of language" (p218)
  • "On the one hand it enables unconstrained creativity; on the other it enables an efficient use of limited processing resources. " (p218)
  • "Desymbolization of language allows us to ignore common sense, play with expectations, say the impossible, model what is not the case, express the inconceivable, escape from the here and now, and create poetry. In the end desymbolization feeds into imagination and gives rise to the richness and diversity of human culture as we know it. " (p218)
  • "restrictions on processing capacity favor making the computations as efficient as possible - that is, making use of functional elements to encode relations that will be interpreted in the end where available. " (p219-220)
    • see also Cookbook.Cognition#CognitiveScalability
  • "A qualitative change may depend for its effectiveness on a quantitative change" (p220)
  • "From the current perspective the pervasive role of grammaticalization processes in natural language has a deeper cause than just <<wear and tear>>, but derives from computational optimization" (p221)
  • Eric Reuland's Research Interests
  • see also my notes on I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
• 12 Grammaticalization From a Biolinguistic Perspective
  • "In this chapter, I show that a biolinguistic approach (e.g. Chomsky 2005b, 2007) hasmuch to offer. In this introduction, I first briefly mention some other linguistic approaches that geneticists and others have often turned to, namely genetic and areal linguistics. In the remainder of the chapter, I argue for a biolinguistic approach. " (p225)
  • "changes [...] can be seen in terms of cognitive economy of the syntactic derivation, e.g. semantically <<lighter>> elements are preferred over <<heavier>> ones. " (p226)
    • see also my notion of Cognitive Scalability and its link to economy of scale and diseconomy of scale
  • "the first step in the evolution of syntax is Merge. It brings with it notions of headedness (once you merge two elements, one determines the resulting label) and structural hierarchy. " (p232)
  • "grammaticalization is a process whereby lexical items lose phonological weight and semantic specificity and gain grammatical functions. " (p232)
  • "It is possible to formulate economy in terms of features: The computational load (in the Narrow Syntax) is less when semantic or interpretable features are not included in the derivation. " (p243)
  • "If thematic structure was already present in protolanguage (Bickerton 1990), the evolutionary change of Merge made them linguistic. What was added through grammaticalization is the morphology, the second layer of necessary information. " (p243)
• 13 Recursion, Phonological Storage Capacity, and the Evolution of Modern Speech
  • "the question becomes what is the relationship of recursion to modern language and thinking? And what might be the mechanism or subspecies of recursion that bestows its advantages to cognition? " (p245)
  • phonological storage capacity (PSC), subsystem of the working memory (WM)
    • "WM consists of a central executive, which manipulates three subsystems: [...]
      • (a) phonological storage system with a vocal and subvocal articulation processor; [...]
      • (b) a visuospatial sketchpad (VSSP), [...]
      • (c) an episodic buffer that integrates information from the other two subsystems and serves as a temporary store for this information and other material to be acted upon by the central executive." (p245)
  • "Konrad Lorenz (1973) saw spatial orientation and the potential to create an <<imagined space>> within the central nervous system as the basis for all conceptual thinking and language. " (p247)
    • see also my ongoing article Augmented Reality Objects In Space Augmented Planification in Action
  • "we labeled this change [genetic neural mutation or epigenetic phenomenon that affected WM capacity sometime between 150,000 years ago and 30,000 years ago] Enhanced Working Memory (EWM)" (p251)
    • consider this in Cookbook.Cognition#WikiBrainMapping
  • "How would EWM, by way of recursion, have enabled modern thinking?
    • One mechanism might have been that the speaker can <<hold in mind>> a much greater number of options, and as such, can give the speaker a greater range of behavioral flexibility and even creativity.
    • Another mechanism may have been that EWM may have aided the rapid evolution of culture through <<thought experiments.>>" (p251)
  • "The sequela of the latter change [genetic neural mutation that occurred sometime between 150,000 and 30,000 years ago enhanced working memory capacity and/or phonological storage capacity] allowed longer recursive and canonical utterances, and a consequent increase in the complexity and information content of utterances. " (p254)
• 14 Why Women Speak Better Than Men and its Significance for Evolution
  • "An explanation that does involve an adaptive function of the lowered larynx is that of size exaggeration" (p256)
  • "in many animal species males have larynges that are much lower than those of the females of the species. " (p256)
  • "the signals that can be produced with these lowered larynges tend to impress other members of the species (or predators) and thus confer an evolutionary advantage. " (p256)
  • "it is therefore quite possible that size exaggeration played a role in the evolution of (especially the male) human vocal tract, I would argue that the size exaggeration hypothesis does not completely explain the unique shape of the human vocal tract. " (p256)
  • "In this chapter, the areas of acoustic space that are accessible by models of the male and female vocal tract are compared. The notion of accessible acoustic area is similar to the maximum vowel space" (p257)
  • "The results of the simulation will be compared with data from male and female speakers, and finally the implications for (modeling) the evolution of speech are discussed. " (p257)
  • "Human perception is logarithmic. This means that humans perceive a doubling of frequency as sounding the same at every frequency. Therefore the logarithm (base 10) of the frequency of the formants was used. In this way every articulation can be characterized as a point in a two-dimensional acoustic space. " (p260)
  • "With each articulatory model, ten data sets were generated, each consisting of 10,000 articulations. For each of these data sets, the area in acoustic space was calculated. " (p263)
  • "Given that the female areas tend to be the largest, it can be concluded that the models with the lower larynx cover a smaller area of acoustic space than the model with the higher larynx. It must be stressed that the difference is small, but that it is significant. " (p263)
  • the Convex hull "for a set of points X in a real vector space V is the minimal convex set containing X." according to Wikipedia
  • "results show that the female vocal tract is able to produce a larger range of acoustic signals than the male vocal tract, given the same articulatory constraints. " (p264)
  • "the differences in acoustic abilities for the models with different larynx shapes and positions are not very large." (p264)
    • "the descent of the larynx, and probably other modifications for speech, were not the crucial factors that they are sometimes made out to be. " (p264)
  • "research described in this chapter has at least illustrated the use of realistic geometric articulatory models in investigating the acoustic abilities of different vocal tracts. " (p265)
• 15 Mosaic Neurobiology and Anatomical Plausibility
  • "Each piece [from the system of neuroanatomical parts that function together to subserve language] may have been, in fact most probably was, evolutionarily shaped to serve some non-linguistic function. " (p269)
  • "Broca's area and the parietal-occipital-temporal junction (POT), plus Wernicke's area (especially for auditory linguistic processing) are necessary, if not sufficient, for language. " (p270)
  • "The discussion [human unique language faculty] is frequently couched in terms of the distinction between
    • the faculty of language narrowly construed, or FLN, and
    • the faculty of language broadly construed, or FLB.
    • FLN contains aspects of language that are both uniquely human and unique to language;
    • FLB contains organism-internal features of language that may be shared with other human cognitive systems and/or with other species. " (p275-276)
  • "distinguish between conceptual structure broadly construed and narrowly constructed, and hence between CSN and CSB. " (p277)
    • conceptual structure broadly construed (CSB)
    • conceptual structure narrowly construed (CSN)
  • "Spatial cognition involves portions of posterior parietal cortex (PPC) that lie adjacent to the POT, specifically Brodmann's areas 5 and 7, which lie along the intraparietal sulcus. " (p280)
  • "human conceptual structure necessarily involves somatosensory-based spatial structure. Serious consideration of the anatomy of PPC and its connectivity with the POT leads to the conclusion that it could be no other way. " (p282)
  • "The PPC-frontal circuitry underlying these thematic relations is shared with all primates, but the PPC evolutionary development yielding the POT is uniquely human. Hence an account of a piece of human linguistic uniqueness. " (p283)
  • "The primary point to be made here is that, whatever else we may require of research on the origins of language, we must insist that the hypotheses made be anatomically (and, ultimately, genetically) plausible. " (p285)

See also

• previous work by author I encountered earlier
  • Evolutionary Dynamics on language and the more specific article Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language, Nature 2007
  • Noam Chomsky for his general work on universal grammar (UG)
  • Steven Mithen for Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory, Routledge 1998
  • Frederick Coolidge and Thomas Wynn for The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking, Wiley-Blackwell 2009
  • Bart de Boer from Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture A Non-Adaptationist, Systems Theoretical Approach, Springer 2006
• Chapter 5 Invention and community in the emergence of language: Insights from new sign languages by Michael A. Arbib in Foundations in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience
  • cf 59, 62, 64, 72, 96, 137, 220, 281 n. 9
• Cultural Science
• Samuel Jay Keyser, Editor-in-Chief of Linguistic Inquiry, with Noam Chomsky, Podcasts at MIT Press Journals September 2009
• Philosophie : Langage avec Raphaël Enthoven et son invite Philippe Schlenker, Arte 2009
• Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain at Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Oxford University
  • aim is to explore how it is that we came to be human
  • main focus is on how the "Social Brain Hypothesis"
• Social Brain, Distributed Mind edited by Robin Dunbar, Clive Gamble and John Gowlett, Oxford University Press 2009
  • Robin Dunbar is also author of Chapter 2 - Why only humans have language
• The Adventure of English, ITV, 2003
• École internationale d’automne en linguistique (EALing) 2009
• René Doursat's page on Morphodynamics : "Bridging the gap between vision and language by importing complex system modeling into linguistics"
• Language evolution in the laboratory, Trends in Cognitive Sciences August 2010

Overall remarks and questions

• evolutionary studies seem to be the realm of hypothesis piggy-backing
  • i.e. "Your hypothesis is just a consequence of mine and was able to leverage it while mine is the real cause."
• study on the evolution of grammar
  • example
    • conjugaison in the french language and why some tenses are not used anymore
  • link to more social studies like ReadingNotes.HighSpeedSociety

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) adducing heretofore feral agonistic (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

Categories

• Neurology
• Sociology

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Other read books linking to the ThePrehistoryOfLanguage page :

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